Future Without Sight

Abstract

The focus of my thesis is an immersive experience and virtual reality for people with visual impairment. Today's mixed reality experiences are highly visual dependent. Losing sight seems a disadvantage that challenges the visually impaired community to access this experience. However, is the disappearance of sights really a disadvantage? Before I narrow my scope, I stepped back from this focus and think of the sense of perceptions in general. Why does sight dominate among all of the senses? What if there is a future without sight? What will it look like?

Process

Scenarios: Future Without Sight
Research:
1. Facts and projects about senses.
2. Can blind people draw?
Experiments: How did people behave without sight?
Takeaways and future

Future Without Sight

People still care about outfit as courtesy so there may be a systematic dress code or outfit code.
People may stop judging someone from looking but also "judging from looking" may be subjective and more biased.

Yeah.. dating app no longer judge you from looking but your voice
There will be "voice enhancement" to make your voice sound better

Research

I spent the first day on quick drawing, sketching, and mind mapping the possible scenarios. I was wondering whether sight always comes to before other senses for people with vision and auditory just as an "enhancement" to help what we perceive through seeing. Is there a way that sound can be kind of "surpass" the sight? In scientific research, "Sound can suppress visual perception", Souta Hidaka and Masakazu Ide from Rikkyo University shows how "white noise bursts presented through headphones degraded visual orientation discrimination performance". The relationship between senses of perceptions is not independent or merely dependent. Instead, they will enhance or interrupt depend on different contexts.

Like "visual illusions", the sound can also be tricky such as Mcgurk Effect, Tritone-paradox, Shepard Scale. There are many ways for auditory to hack on with illusions, become entertaining, and even bring more fun than what vision brought us in the future.

I am also interested in the phenomenon called "Synesthesia," a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. People have this can "hear," "taste,", and "smell" color or visual stuff. There are about 4% of the population in the world has these abilities. Perhaps it can be an intriguing base for future cross-modal interactions without visions.

Another side of my research involves a lot of sensing project in speculative design, architecture, and installation arts. One of my inspirations comes from the book See Yourself Sensing By Madeline Schwartzman. Her projects are proactive, and some of them are not very comfortable to examine. They inspired me to see sensing in frame-like procedures and really think of how we sense and how I might record sensing. Also, the art piece by Olafur Eliasson encourages audiences to see art and "hear, taste and smell".His works inspire me to think of as a sighted person. How can I make sight less "dominating", maybe even get rid of it, make it equally important to the other four senses?

See Yourself Sensing

Olafur's pieces

Experiments: How did people behave without sight?

My approach is to observe and gather insights from studying how people behave without sight in my experiment sections. For example, can people still be able to draw? I want to engage my participants to avoid using sights and interact with objects in the physical and digital environments.

Experiment I, Part I:

In this experiment, I asked my participant to blindfold and draw 3 things:
- Favorite animals
- Favorite food
- A 3D object (cube)

Result:

Experiment I, Part II:

In part II, I played 3 soundtracks that the participant never heard before and asked him to react with a gut reaction to draw on the paper while blindfolded. Also, I prepared a bunch of colored pencils without telling him what colors I have. He could ask me for any color he wants for his drawing anytime. If I do not have the color he asked, I just used a pencil to replace.

Songs I played:

Debussy: Prelude to the afternoon of a faun
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op.4 - Boulez.
Wagner: Ride of the valkyries

Results:

Trees and Moons

Hallway

King in Palace

Experiment II: Part I

I prepared six different 3d objects for experiments II and three for the part I (in red) and three for part II. I asked my participant blindfold, and I will hand him an object each time. He will touch it, guess it, and draw it on the paper.

The objects:

Masking tape
Lid
paper star

Results:

Experiment II: Part II

In part II, I used another three different objects. Instead of drawing, I gave my participant clay to reconstruct what he touched.

The objects:

A mini cup
A box cover
A squishy animal

Results:

Mini Cup

Box

Squishy animals

Mini Cup

Box

Squishy animals

Experiment III

In this experiment, I want to design a platform that people can jump out of current "immersive experience," such as teamLab. Ideally, I want to create an installation or space for people to be blindfolded and focused on auditory and tactile senses.

However, due to pandemic, I experimentally conducted this through Zoom via webcam and speaker. In this experience, participants are supposed to blindfold themselves and use body gestures to change what they heard and have something in mind to draw with body parts and movements. The webcam detected postures and covert to "virtual brush stroke." The participant's gesture will impact on brush's color, width, and pitch of sound they heard. Participants would not know what is going on the screen or what their drawings look like until they decided to end this experience.

Thank to Zoom, I had four participants across world to test this experimental piece. Also, the piece is available on

https://www.liaoxiaohan.me/MicroThesis/firstpage/index.html

Results:

Some Testing Process, sorry fo this quality.

Takeaways:

In this one week-long process, I gathered many insights about sense of perceptions through researching, designing experiments, and conducting experiments. Although the last experiment could not be considered a 100% successful prototype because of initial tech issues, some of my participants saw what they were doing before blindfolded. However, I still had some insights. One of my participants said, "I feel so insecure without sight in my afterward interview. It is strange but makes me really stop wondering about people without sight's life." From here, I slightly have some reassurance. Also, watching other behavior through experiments is a reflection and learning process. "Everything is kind of slow down when I cannot see" is from my participants.

I definitely want to add on physical prototyping because besides auditory, tactile, smell, and taste are also left here that I did not explore. Furthermore, the auditory itself has many techniques. I imagine it will be the primary role if there is no sight in the future of immersive experience for people without sight or poor sight. This week, I also got feedback from Light House and a couple of people of blind community in China.

The sighted person will think "red" is a concrete concept and "justice" is an abstract concept, where blind people consider them both abstract concepts. Will there a way to help born blind people learn color as a concrete concept in the future? Will the immersive platform also be a creative or design tool for blind people to create and design? Maybe, in the future, we will have a very successful blind graphic designer in the world. I hope I can continue to explore these in my future research and creation.

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